1. Technical Field
This application relates generally to bottle cap assemblies, and more particularly to a spring-loaded bottle cap/applicator apparatus particularly well-suited for moving fluids from the very lowermost interior surface of a container such as a nail polish bottle.
2. Discussion
Cap assemblies having elongated brush members are used in a wide variety of applications such as with nail polish bottles, small paint jars, and a wide variety of applications where it is necessary to withdraw liquids or semi-solid compounds from the interior area of a jar or bottle containing such fluids or compounds.
With prior art cap/brush assemblies, the brush has to be of a length to enable the cap to which it is secured to be threadably engaged with a neck of a bottle without causing the brush to be forcibly urged into a lowermost interior surface of the bottle, which would thereby damage and/or deform the brush and possibly a stem member to which the brush may be attached. Accordingly, when such prior art cap assemblies are designed, an amount of clearance between the very bottom of the brush and the lowermost interior surface of the bottle must be allowed for, which clearance represents substantially the distance which the cap travels downwardly onto the neck portion as the cap is threaded onto the neck portion of the bottle. Thus, the brush does not reach down to closely adjacent the lowermost inner surface of the container bottle and the contents at the lower surface of the bottle cannot be reached and withdrawn by the brush unless the cap is screwed completely downwardly onto the neck portion of the bottle.
The inability of prior art cap/brush assemblies to reach down into the very lowermost portion of the bottle or container with which they are used adds significantly to the inconvenience in using such caps/brush assemblies. This is because the cap must be threaded downwardly completely onto the neck portion of the bottle each time the brush is inserted into the bottle to reach the very lowermost interior area of the bottle, and then threadably unscrewed from the neck of the container.
In addition to the significant inconvenience that conventional cap/brush assemblies introduce in day-to-day use, the inability to reach fluids at the lowermost interior areas of bottles with which such cap/brush assemblies are used often produces a significant amount of waste when such bottles are discarded with appreciable amounts of fluids therein. This problem is particularly well exemplified with reference to nail polish and nail polish remover containers. With businesses involved in the beauty industry, which businesses use very large quantities of nail polish and nail polish remover, the waste represented by the fluid which is inaccessible by conventional prior art cap/brush assemblies can translate into very significant monetary losses accumulated over even relatively short periods of time.
Accordingly, it is a principal object of the present invention to provide a cap/applicator apparatus which is operable to extend downwardly to a point closely adjacent a very lowermost inner surface of a bottle or other like container such as a nail polish bottle, without threadably screwing the cap/applicator apparatus down onto a neck portion of the bottle, and which includes a brush member which remains generally stationary relative to the bottle while the cap of the apparatus is threadably screwed onto the threaded neck portion of the bottle.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a spring-loaded bottle cap/applicator apparatus which includes a coil spring held captively within a cap assembly of the apparatus, where the spring is operable to maintain the brush member in an outwardly biased position relative to the cap assembly when the cap assembly is not threadably engaged with a neck portion of a bottle with which it is coupled to.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a spring-loaded bottle cap/applicator apparatus which is extremely simple to construct and which includes a minimum number of components to thereby reduce significantly the complexity of manufacturing the apparatus, while also reducing significantly the cost associated with its manufacture.